Google Books
MONETIZATION OF LIBRARIES
Google Book Deal explained 2009
Google's Monetization of Libraries
Google and the libraries involved have at their core a mission and philosophy of open access to information, even if their economic and organizational missions are very different. This conflict can be seen as a conscious attempt to push the boundaries of copyright law outward, by organizations that are well-informed about the legal issues but determined to build a more open information model. They are saying “sue us.” Google co-founder Larry Page is cited in an article that appeared in Tuesday's Information World Review as being a "firm believer in academic libraries being able to 'monetise' the information they hold." (3) Paul Courant, provost at the University of Michigan, is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying the project is worth "hundreds of millions" of dollars to his University alone. (4) Google obviously considers that kind of money to be a good investment, which means they expect many hundreds of millions in revenue from these collections, through advertising in the near term and probably other means in the longer term.
DIGITIZING IN - COPYRIGHT BOOKS
Digitizing in-copyright books and acquiring copyright permissions, has taken place in terms of developing the Universal Library http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu/html/ with a goal of digitizing one million books as well as other digitization efforts.
Carnegie Mellon is working with a number of other libraries on the One Million Book Project and with the governments of India and China. One thing they have discovered is that getting permission for digitizing in-copyright books is a time consuming and expensive proposition.
Legal's view is that what is copyright protected
is the SEQUENCE of the words
The following is based upon a lengthy evaluation from the university's legal counsel explaining that it's OK to digitize a book, create a searchable index, and offer full text searching WITHOUT the permission of the copyright holder -- provided that you not only don't display, but that you destroy the digitized pages.
Legal's view is that what is copyright protected is the SEQUENCE of the words, so you can break up the sequence in an index and use it for retrieval, but you can't display the words in context (a "snippet") because the sequence is copyright protected.
Some leaders of the Universal Library tend to think that a snippet (a few lines) is covered under fair use. One
of the directors of the UL has developed a user interface he calls "contextual searching," which displays your search terms in context, i.e., with a snippet of words before and after your search terms.
The business about the digitization being done by a commercial firm (Google) rather than the library that purchased the book - gets at the law that says a library can digitize a legally acquired copy of a book without permission under certain circumstances for PRESERVATION purposes. The preservation copy is NOT a USE copy. There are some strict, mitigating circumstances that would allow the preservation copy to be used (e.g., if there was no other copy available on the planet at a reasonable price to purchase or borrow), but the preservation copy could ONLY be used on computers IN the library that held the legally acquired (now totally deteriorated, dilapidated) book.
Courts Unlikely To Stop Google Book Copying by Christopher Huen, September 2, 2005
"Despite objections from publishers and writers, copyright law appears to be on Google's side, legal experts say. The social value of Google's initiative to digitize library books, including those protected by copyright, will likely weigh heavily in the search engine's favor."
Yahoo and Microsoft have also made deals with libraries to digitize books.
CORNELL OPENS COLLECTION TO MICROSOFT
Microsoft has announced two partners in its book scanning project, which will compete with Google's controversial Book Search program. Cornell University will allow Microsoft to scan its library collection, and Kirtas Technologies will provide high-speed hardware for the
scanning. Unlike Google's program, Microsoft's Windows Live Book Search will only scan books in the public domain or those whose copyright owners have granted explicit permission. Librarians from Cornell will select texts to be scanned and will oversee quality control for the process. Kirtas claims that its scanning machines are capable of digitizing 2,400 pages per hour and are gentler that human hands with the books.
2009
A Book Grab by Google by Brewster Kahle
For the majority of books -- considered "orphan" works -- no one will claim ownership. The author may have died; the publisher might have gone out of business or doesn't respond to inquiries; the original contract has disappeared. Google would get an explicit, perpetual license to scan and sell access to these in-copyright but out-of-print orphans, which make up an estimated 50 to 70 percent of books published after 1923. No other provider of digital books would enjoy the same legal protection. The settlement also creates a Book Rights Registry that, in conjunction with Google, would set prices for all commercial terms associated with digital books."
Thomas Lord "The issue as I see it is that the law already had provisions for the kind of scanning Google wanted to do. Libraries are explicitly permitted
by federal statute to build such scanned collections and explicitly forbidden to partner with a 3rd party for that 3rd party's commercial advantage. Google
and the libraries that participated simply ignored the law. The scanning could have been legally performed by Google by leaving the libraries, not Google, with the final database. Google could have offered technological assistance to the libraries to put an API on the collection that would afford Google a chance to build something like their book search feature. They could have stayed in bounds and instead they behaved as if the law didn't apply to them on account of their good names."
EU will examine Google book settlement
Google Book-Scanning Pact to Give Libraries a Say in Price
GOOGLE PRINT BOOK LIBRARY
EXERPT: "a page view is a page view, regardless of whether the page in question has a picture of a cat, a single link to another site, or the full text of Freakonomics. When all you're selling is ad space, the value shifts from the content to the viewer. And ultimately the content is valued at nothing. And here, finally, is the larger problem posed by Google's actions.
Books are not in any important sense user-centric. Whether or not a book has readers matters little. Books stand on their own, over time, as ideas and creations. In the world of books, it is the ideas and the authors that matter most, not the readers. That is why the copyright exists in the first place, to protect the value of these created works, a value which Google is trying mightily to deny. As much as any other American business, Google is the corporate embodiment of the Internet's first principles. And as with so much else on the Internet, the promise of Google Book Search lies somewhere off on the horizon, while the dangers it poses today are very real."
About Google Book Search which used to be called Google Print Library Project Source known as the library that all the world could use via "universal accessibility" is now turning its readers over first to bookstores, and then to libraries as it becomes more and more plainly obvious that Google's library is not really a library but merely a catalog for bookstores and libraries for those who already have easy access to them. ~ Michael Hart, Internet user #100 since 1971 & Gutenberg Project Executive Coordinator http://www.gutenberg.org
Google Print vs. The Open Library vs. Project Gutenberg
The Year of the Electronic Library: Obviously the Big Boys have finally discovered books on the Internet.
Just under a year ago Google's multi-million dollar media blitz of December 14 ran hog wild through the media, getting more attention from television, radio and print media than eBooks had received in toto during their 35 years of existence, in spite of "The Wall St. Journal" claim to fame as being the first to put the word INTERNET on the front page or cover of any major media outlet in Oct, 1991,in reference to the growing idea[l] of Project Gutenberg eBooks.
However, since Google didn't really DO anything after such a great public relations coup, no one ended up paying any attention and it appears as if the momentum, at least the media momentum was lost. This was confirmed a few weeks ago when Yahoo and Internet Archive press releases about starting a competitive eLibrary failed to put any wind in the media's sails.
However, Google seems to have been paying attention, and finally a release from the Google Print Library resulted, but it turned out, sadly to say, that these releases were not turning out to be greatevents as had been predicted last December 14.
Most of the books were hard to search, impossible to download, and on subjects of little interest, and what interest there was stayed with the various lawsuits Google was being threatened with for any of a number of copyright problems, even though Google pretended an enormous amount of public domain works were still copyrighted in a concerted effort to ameliorate the situation.
Not content to let the Google Print Library and Yahoo Open Content Alliance/Open Book Library steal all this glory, Amazon and Random House announced their own eLibrary just a week later.
Today we saw yet another entry from The Library of Congress, as it received 3 million dollars to start their own project, from a most unlikely source, Google! It was suggested at today's Geek Lunch a motivation of Google's might be to let The Library of Congress pay the price in non-cash value, for opening the vast intercontinental virtual prairieland to the virtual settlers, who just happed to be an assortment of multi-billion dollar cartels, who have felt those slings and arrows of their misfortune a little too much.
There are already open source research sites available.
Directory of Open Access Repositories:
"The OpenDOAR service is being developed to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. This will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world."
"The project is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and the Lund University in Sweden. Both institutions are active in supporting Open Access development. Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is known throughout the world." Also find out about the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), a project based at the University of Southampton.
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So, in just a single month we have seen more "action" on the parts of these multi-billion dollar alliances than ever before, except a person still has huge trouble actually downloading eBooks from any of these eLibraries. But, then again, that might NOT be their purpose, after all.
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The original purpose of eLibraries, as Project Gutenberg set out a while back in 1971, was to provide library materials for people to keep, to use as sources for new editions, new libraries, etc., and to be the source for continual improvements over the centuries.
The purpose of these new entries into the fray seems to be by some other thing, as they do not invite readers to keep these materials and to create new and better editions for future readers, both via new editions, and by correcting previous editions.
The original ideal of eBooks was:
"to encourage the creation and distribution" of eLibraries, but the Newspeak Dictionary seems to have somewhat changed definitions.
The original ideal of eBooks was also to allow every reader to read in their own favorite program, and to use their own favorite search programs, indexing and concordance programs, and to choose favorite colors, margin lengths, page lengths, etc.
I can only hope there is something WE can do to keep these ideals-- such as they are--alive and thriving so WE can have our own eBooks, or own eLibraries, the way WE want them.
Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg
Print Encyclopedias Join Dinosaurs Part 1
EBOOKS
Google-Watch.org, argued that the Google search engine invades privacy, posted a heretofore confidential contract between Google and the University of Michigan.
Michigan Digitization Project PDF is the university hosted page about activities there.
§ 108. Limitations on exclusive rights: Reproduction by libraries and archives
The United States Library of Congress has announced the creation of the World Digital Library today, a project that's also just received its first $3 million in funding from Google."